Derivations
The story is said to have had a profound effect on the young Nathaniel Hawthorne when he was a student at Bowdoin. Peter Rugg is mentioned in Hawthorne's story, "The Virtuoso's Collection," in Mosses from an Old Manse (1842). Herman Melville's title character in "Bartleby the Scrivener" seems to allude to Rugg's wandering. Edward Everett Hale's 1863 story, "The Man Without a Country", about a young American officer who curses the United States in 1807 and is sentenced to spend his life wandering the seas with no news reports from home, clearly derives from William Austin's story.
Two women poets of New England wrote long verse based on on the Rugg story. Louise Imogen Guiney, in ”Peter Rugg, the Bostonian,“ published in Scribner’s Magazine (December 1891), gave a new version of the story in which the wandering Rugg was accompanied by his "little son" rather than the ten-year-old daughter, Jenny, who was the child in the original tale. Amy Lowell published her prose-poem ballad ”Before the Storm: the Legend of Peter Rugg“ in The North American Review (September 1917). In Lowell's piece, Rugg drives through Boston but does not recognize it after many years. Both poets recalled the Rugg story as a ghost tale from their childhood, and evidently were unaware of its literary origin in Austin's stories.
According to Alexander Woollcott, Rudyard Kipling and his English publisher A.S. Frere-Reeves were largely responsible for rediscovering Austin and publicizing the origins of the Peter Rugg tale.
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